The Sweet Taste of Domesticity
by kiiroi yumetobu
Summary: They were just going to be flat mates –they weren't moving in together per se, at least not according to Ishida. IchigoXIshida, fluff, v-day drabble.


Happy Chinese Valentine's Day! I just found out from the Hong Kong radio station that it was today –so, I hope everyone enjoys the festive season and go a bit crazy with the roses and pinks and reds and chocolates. I'm still waiting on a promised Toblerone from my mom, so meanwhile here is an Ichiuri for my dear readers!

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><p><em>The Sweet Taste of Domesticity<br>_

Ichigo grunted with effort, his joints creaking in protest as he reached up to change the light bulb. Having not been touched for at least a decade, the piercing squeak of metal-against-metal was comparable to the sound of a rusty handsaw against bone. He had only managed to remove the dusty glass dome when the support beneath him suddenly shifted –crying out in surprise, the bulb slipped out of his palm and smashed on the ground.

"Kon!" he snapped, "can't you even stay still for a _second_?"

The lion plushy, twice the size of the young man standing on top of its back, arduously twisted its head to glare at him.

"How long do you need to change a flipping light bulb? My back is giving out here, you know!"

Ichigo was about to reply when the door opened with a bang and a dark-haired young man burst into the room.

"Ichigo!" Ishida shouted irately. "I _told_ you not to change that one, and here you are, changing it! You might as well not have any ears!"

"Well, which _one _was it you wanted me to change, for God's sake?" Ichigo responded petulantly.

"_That _one," Ishida barked, pointing somewhere to his right. Ichigo followed the line of Ishida's outstretched arm and saw the glistening red apple, screwed tightly to the ceiling where a bulb should have been.

"You _know _we can't change that one!" he retorted. "It says right there on our contract, under no circumstances are the tenants allowed to touch the apple on the ceiling of the living room, or the lease will be immediately revoked!"

Ishida clenched his jaw and crossed his arms. "I don't care. Change it."

"No! We spent _a whole fucking month _looking for a decent flat, do you want us to end up on the streets in a cardboard box?"

Before Ishida could reply, Kon suddenly threw the mandarin-haired teen off his shoulders and bounded towards their right. Ichigo had no time to nurse the bump on his head, because the giant toy had risen onto its hind legs, opened its jaws and was tearing the fruit off the moldy ceiling.

"NO! Kon, _stop _right there!" Ichigo screamed, trying to right himself.

"Ichigo," said Ishida composedly above the raucous _crunch smush crack _of the masticating Kon, "why are you wearing my grandmother's bloomers?"

Ichigo gave the frilly pink underwear around his hips barely a glance before he screeched, "We have to go to the convenience store _right now_ –

"Kurosaki?"

"And replace that fucking apple before it's too late –

"Kurosaki!"

With a choked gasp, Ichigo woke up with a jerk. He squinted through the early evening light that seeped into the room in expanding columns of dandelion. Half-unpacked boxes of books, kitchen utensils and other household goods were messily stacked in one corner of the room, sagging dejectedly under each other's weight. Ichigo shifted his aching, heavy body with a groan on the beige double sofa on which he had fallen asleep, his long legs that had been draped over one arm for the last half-hour now prickling with pins and needles.

_Oh, that's right_.

This was not his two-story house in Karakura, but a small flat situated on the borderline of Bunkyo City. He and Ishida had managed, with their meager savings and niggardly income from part time work, to rent a space for two that was within reasonable distance from the Tokyo Medical and Dental University. Freshly graduated from high school and having just crawled through a series of entrance exams protracted and difficult enough to draw blood, what surprised Ichigo the most was not that he managed to get into one of the most prestigious medical schools in Japan, nor that he managed to get into the _same _university as the inveterately hard-working and intelligent Quincy (not that he gave himself any other option under the condescending, punctilious scrutiny of his enigmatic father).

No, it wasn't any of that. What surprised him the most was that Ishida Uryuu, his boyfriend of one turbulent year, had agreed to live with him for the better part of five to seven years, if not more –in a flat described on a real estate website page as "a quaint, refurnished flat within convenient distance from the center of Tokyo, perfect for university students", which was really little more than a studio with plywood walls sectioning off a two by two meter square in one corner of the forty meter square space. They were just going to be flat mates –they weren't moving in together _per se_, at least not according to Ishida. But that didn't stop Mizuiro (as always) and his zealous pals from tagging along to help with the luggage, a.k.a. to make a whole lot of boisterous mess and basically act like idiots. _Non sequitur, _upon arrival a house warming party was promptly held; complete with a brand new set of king sized bed linen that was too big for the 'bedroom' and matching wine glasses that read 'Groom' and 'Groom'.

Being the teenagers they were, they all ended up carousing until midnight before leaving. Exhausted, the young couple went straight to bed afterwards. After a night of tossing and turning, Ichigo got up at eight (Ishida at six, naturally) and they had been unpacking ever since.

"Kurosaki," said Ishida crossly for the third time. "Are you awake now?"

Ichigo stretched out his stiff body with a grunt, then he sent a languorous grin in his lover's direction.

"Uryuu… I thought you were out grocery shopping?"

The Quincy scowled in disapproval as Ichigo wiped off the trail of drool from the side of his mouth with the back of his hand.

"_Yes_, Kurosaki," he replied impatiently, "in the last forty-five minutes I had gone to the supermarket, bought our food supplies, came back, organized them _and_ put them in the fridge and cupboards. Before I came back you should already have finished unpacking that box, but from the looks of it all you've been doing is lie there like a dormant bear."

The shinigami gave a spectacular yawn. "Ah'm sorry, Uryuu… I was so sleepy…"

"Secondly," Ishida interrupted flatly, "what is the meaning of _this_?"

By 'this', he meant the light blue toothbrush that he was holding in his right hand like it was the prime evidence to some flagrant criminal act.

_Uh-oh._

That low, no-nonsense tone, narrowed blue eyes and one hand on his hip –no doubt about it, Ishida was in lecture mode.

Ichigo hastily rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and fumbled for the 'on' switch in his brain, so that he could muster an answer that would hopefully be satisfactory by Ishida's standards. Being the way he was, the neurons in his brain responsible for constructing sensible responses simply glanced off each other with dull sparks then traipsed off in opposite directions.

"Uh… are you looking for a philosophical answer to that?"

"Kurosaki!"

Ichigo flinched. "I mean, um… that's a toothbrush, right?"

"More precisely," elucidated Ishida, "this is _my _toothbrush. Your one is orange. And from the looks of it, you've used my one this morning to brush _your_ teeth! They're complementary colors, how could you mix it up?"

"Um…" Ichigo drew out the syllable for as long as he possibly could as he tried to recall what he did with his own toothbrush the previous night.

He _had _used the orange one before going to bed… but this morning, half-blind with sleep and disoriented in the unfamiliar surroundings, he had fumbled for the toothbrush on the sink and grabbed the first thing that his clumsy fingers could reach. By the time he noticed that he was using Ishida's, he was already halfway through his teeth brushing routine. He couldn't seem to find his own (not that he put _that _much effort into looking for it), and so he figured that he might as well use Ishida's. Ichigo thought that as long as he rinsed it properly, his boyfriend wouldn't notice.

Apparently, he noticed.

"I lost mine," Ichigo concluded tentatively, "so I used yours."

Ishida stared at him as if losing a toothbrush was just about as improbable as slimy green aliens.

"The point of the matter is," the raven asserted, "how could you _possibly _think it's all right to just use somebody else's toothbrush?"

Ichigo groaned. "Oh my god, what's the big deal? You don't throw a _bitch fit _every time I lick your spoon or shove my tongue down your throat –

"Bitch fit? _Ha! _If you think that _this _is a bitch fit, then you seriously need to crack open that thick skull of yours and open up that obsolete drawer labeled _common sense_, and see if you can find where you 'lost' your own stupid toothbrush; while you're at it, you'd better do some spring cleaning to get rid of all those cobwebs and _oh_, why don't you take _my_ toothbrush with you to do some dusting since you seem to like taking other people's stuff without their permission so bloody much –

Ishida's ranting came to an abrupt stop when he realized that his boyfriend was visibly shaking with half-stifled laughter.

Either he really had some nerve, or he had just teetered off the precipice of sanity.

He was about to demand what was so damn funny, when a strong tug at the elbows took him by surprise and threw him off balance, sending him landing in a heap on top of Ichigo's broad chest.

Before Ishida could raise his head to glower, a big, warm hand was slipped into his hair, coupled with a hot kiss at the nape of his neck –caresses that really _shouldn't _have, but did, send distracting ripples of pleasure down Ishida's spine.

Ichigo was still chuckling as the raven pushed himself up into a sitting position on the narrow couch.

Ishida regarded him with a half-hearted glare and readjusted his glasses that had been knocked askew. "Did you work out the punch line to some joke you heard last year, or have you just lost it?"

The shinigami rolled his eyes. "_No_. It's only been a day, and we're already bantering away like newlyweds. I just thought it was funny."

Red bloomed across Ishida's cheeks like the splash of spilt madder and he quickly denied, "we are _not _newlyweds…"

Ichigo simply dragged Ishida's lithe arm closer to press a lingering kiss on the underside of a pale wrist.

"I know, I know. It's just a saying. But aren't you at least a _teeny _bit as happy as I am that we've come this far together, Uryuu?"

The tip of his tongue was already armed with a quick-fire retort, but Ishida held it back because of the look that Ichigo was giving him: a rare, childish grin of lazy happiness, and eyes of burnt umber that were placed solely, lovingly on him with an almost reverent intensity.

Not to mention that the battle was already lost with Ichigo lying there in the most sexy sprawl, his t-shirt bunched up in all the right places during his sleep to reveal a toned stomach and jutting hipbones, below which denim-clad thighs were spread open, trapping Ishida in between…

"Aha!" cried the taller boy. "That was a smile there, I saw it! You were smiling!"

The quincy scowled. "I _was _not."

"You _so _were –_ow!_"

Ishida had reached over to pinch his side, giving him a somewhat solid excuse to leave his hand splayed across a tempting strip of bare, tanned skin.

"I'm still mad at you, you know," Ishida said scornfully, but with noticeably less bite than before.

With an apologetic grin on his lips, Ichigo rubbed his hand therapeutically along his boyfriend's forearm. "I'm sorry for using your things without asking… forgive me, Uryuu?"

The serious, flat line of Ishida's lips slid into the beginnings of a smile, and slanted eyes glittered a mischievous Prussian blue behind his specs.

"Not until you've learnt your lesson, Ichigo… _clearly _you lack some good manners. This isn't just _your _house, you know," he chided whilst drawing his fingertip nonchalantly along the protruding waistband of Ichigo's boxers.

Sensing an escape route in –and from –his tight pants, Ichigo promptly made a point of squirming around on the sofa to get comfortable; efficaciously sliding his crumpled t-shirt up to his ribcage and drawing Ishida closer in the process.

He slipped his hand beneath the raven's shirt and rubbed tantalizing circles around his lower stomach, grinning as he saw a glint of desire in those sharp, blue eyes.

"I won't say no to some domestic training," Ichigo purred. "Plus, I'm a fast learner."

His companion raised one eyebrow and remarked, "We'll soon see about that, won't we?"

"Always a skeptic," Ichigo teased before he pulled his boyfriend in for a kiss.

The quincy daintily placed his toothbrush upon the adjacent _kotatsu_, and efficiently set about inculcating some 'proper household behavior' upon his keen lover.

Ichigo and Ishida both knew that living together meant that they would have their daily dose of disagreements –but if at least _some _of their arguments resulted in moments like these, then it was definitely worth it.

_Owari_

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><p>I hope you enjoyed that! Feedback will be much appreciated!<p> 


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